‘#1 Happy Family USA' cocreator Ramy Youssef reveals how animation was the perfect way to capture the middle school experience
When the idea of #1 Happy Family USA was becoming a reality, part of what drew cocreator Ramy Youssef to do it as an animated show was the age of the show's protagonist. 'Middle school in general feels dramatic. [It] feels like the surveillance state. You go, who's looking at me? Is Courtney talking about me? What did she say? All of that stuff feels like a level of national security for a kid. There's no real wall of understanding that a kid's personal drama is not the biggest thing going on in the world,' he tells Gold Derby during our recent Meet the Experts: TV Animation panel. Doing this as an animated show has also given the show the perfect tone. 'There are things that we can animate here that would be just too dramatic, but in this format feel really alive and really fun.'
The series, which can currently be streamed on Prime Video, follows the Husseins, an Egyptian-American Muslim family living in New Jersey as they navigate trying to be seen as a quintessential American family in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Youssef created the show alongside Pam Brady and stars Salma Hindy, Randa Jarrar, Alia Shawkat, Mandy Moore, Chris Redd, Kieran Culkin, and Timothy Olyphant.
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Youssef had a very specific idea of what he wanted the show to look like. 'I think part of what we were trying to nail is this feeling of could this show almost feel like a found VHS tape of something that came out in that time? So, we didn't want a modern computer animation look.' They ended up using an all-Muslim animation studio in Malaysia, which presented some additional unexpected challenges. 'We actually had to downgrade the computers that we were using in L.A. to fit what they were using in Malaysia. It's this really trippy process and they had not done something at this scale of a series.'
He adds that his family has seen the show and that they have really seemed to enjoy it, especially since it's not directly based on specific instances in their life from that time period. His family particularly liked getting to see him do so many different things in the series. 'I got to do so much voice work on this, which Pam Brady honestly really encouraged me to do.It wasn't exactly my goal but I got to play with that and play with creating. I wrote a bunch of songs for it as well.'
This article and video are presented by Prime Video.
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